Page:Measuring Euripides.djvu/11

 their justice is slow but sure. There are moments of exalted religious experience, as in the lines, "Golden wings are on my back and I am shod with the winged sandals of the Sirens and I am going aloft into the far ether to meet Zeus". But Euripides' characters not only with Isaiah "mount up on wings like eagles", they also "walk and not faint". "This is the life free from evil," sings the chorus in the Bacchanals, "if a man limit his thoughts to human themes as is his mortal nature, making no pretense in heavenly things. I envy not deep subtleties. I joy rather in pursuing the great clear eternal truths, that a man live his life by day and night in purity and holiness, striving toward a noble goal, and that he honor the gods by casting from him all evil principles".

There are also, however, moments of doubt and bewilderment, as when Helen wonders who can define God amid this mortal whirl, or Melanippe says "Zeus, whoever Zeus is, for I know him only by name", or when Talthybius exclaims in Hecuba, "Oh Zeus, what shall I say? that you watch over men, or that this is a false opinion accepted without reason, namely, that there is a race of gods,—whereas chance rules the affairs of men". Indeed, chance, fortune, fate and necessity are so often mentioned by Euripides that his writings give considerable ground for the reproach of the Fathers of the Christian church that Tyche or Fortune was really the chief diety of paganism. But we also note in a large number of passages a close association of nature and religion, and of springs, glens, groves, peaks, waves, oak and pine, olive and ivy, sun, moon, and stars with myth and with cult.

There are also moments of spiritual consolation as when the chorus in Hippolytus finds thinking of the gods comforting despite the chaos of human affairs. There are moments of confident waiting for divine help as in the line from the Children of Heracles, "Zeus is my ally, I shall not fear." There are moments of religious conformity as when even the aged Tiresias joins the dance of the Bacchic revellers. There are moments of submission to the divine will as in the advice of Dionysius to Pentheus, "I would sacrifice to him rather than in a rage kick against the pricks; thou a mortal, he a god." There are moments of supreme self confidence as in the famous fragment preserved for us both by Cicero and Plutarch, by the Roman emperors Marcus Aurelius and Julian, by the mystics Iamblichus and Hermes Trismegistus, "The mind in each of us is a god." But against this may be set another fragment much quoted in antiquity: "Do you see this lofty unexperienced ether encircling earth in its moist embrace? This consider Zeus; call this God." This apparently materialistic view of God, however, is not necessarily inconsistent with the other passage for Euripides more than once speaks of the human mind as after death losing its individuality and rejoining the immortal ether. When the dying man "breathes forth the